G400 Vanilla vs. G550?

[Gurm]

Hey all. Quick question...

I'm biding my time until "that card" appears. However, in the meantime I have reverted from the Kyro2 back to the G400 due to some... *ahem* compatibility issues.

Question is... since I never DID get a G400 MAX, would I see any performance and/or clarity improvement switching to a G550?

- Gurm

[Stringy]

as long as you stay in 2D you'll see some clearity improvement and slight speed improvement...

3D is marginally, if that, better than my G400... I've setup 2 G550's so far and benched the last one.. it was a AMD XP1600+ O/C'ed to 1.6Ghz and it did maybe 5 or so frames per second more than my P3@980..
And in my Opinion the 3D on the G400 looks better than the G550's 3D


Just my opinion...
Craig

[Wombat]

If you ever use EMBM (probably not), the G550 has a crappy implementation.

I would just try to OC the G400 for all its worth.

[The PIT]

The last drivers brought MY G550 close to my Overclocked G400 in 3dmark 2001. In 2D at 1024 * 768 the G550 looks better I can't comment on higher res like 1600 * 1200 becuase the monitors start to loose focus anyway.

[Alec]

...and wouldn´t this be THAT card :

http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/winfastti500/page2.asp

Seriously now,

The G400 SGRAM with a bit of overclocking can be as fast as the MAX... so, it´s probably not worth the cost of buying a G550 in between your G400 and the next card... we´re talking negligible differences here... unless you have money burning in your pockets.

[Inray]

IMHO you should stay with G400 even non MAX

I use G400, 450 and 550 in my office computers and i've installed more than twenty G550 last month. 550 is just a cost effective way to have Matrox famous rock solid dual head nothing more or less. Its 2D video signal quality is far inferior than G400 at least on high resolutions with more blurry and shoapy text.
As for 2D speed all my tests found G550 at least 20 percent slower than G400 on simple tasks like window redraw-move and desktop apps.
Under Windows XP a recent benchmark (XPBench) found it 30-40 percent slower than 400MAX and 20-30 percent slower than plain G400.
I read some possitive user comments about G550, some mention that it's faster than G400. Anyway just think that it uses 64bit memory bus. Today's 32bit highres desktops move large chunks of memory between GPU and memory and the 64bit cause bottlenecks and noticable delays.
Don't think that i dislike G550. It's a nice solid card for simple business apps but it's not a MAX or even a plain G400.

[Gurm]

Alec - no card from nShitty-hahahahahahahaha is "that" card.

- Gurm

[Maggi]

By all means, stick with your G400 !

If I were you, I'd OC it and keep it until something better comes ...